Lives in Cricket No 5 - Rockley Wilson

Chapter Eleven Later Years Although he had retired, Rockley Wilson found himself making an important contribution to the county club in the following 1924 season when again Yorkshire won the Championship. Yorkshire’s success was bought at the price of a further deterioration in the club’s relationship with certain other counties, particularly Middlesex and Surrey. The flashpoint was the match at Bramall Lane against Middlesex when aggressive appealing and apparent dissent at the umpires’ decisions, by Waddington in particular, provoked the crowd into barracking the Middlesex players and to other unruly behaviour. Wisden reported: “For some reason, the Sheffield crowd, forgetting their old reputation for good sportsmanship, barracked more or less persistently all through the game, making the atmosphere almost unbearable.” The reasons were fairly obvious. A Middlesex side containing several amateurs with public school and Oxbridge backgrounds, based at Lord’s, the headquarters of the cricket ‘establishment’, was never going to be a favourite of the Bramall Lane crowd – or of many of the Yorkshire players for that matter – especially after the innings defeat that Middlesex had inflicted on Yorkshire in the earlier fixture at Lord’s. Criticism from that quarter of the way Yorkshire played the game was bound to annoy many of the county’s supporters. Anyhow, the outcome of the rumpus was that the umpires, H.R.Butt and W.Reeves, reported the incidents to Lord’s and Middlesex backed up their protests by threatening to discontinue the fixture with Yorkshire for the 1925 season. An MCC committee was set up to enquire into the matter and concluded that the umpires’ complaints were justified. Waddington was persuaded to write a letter of apology to MCC and Rockley Wilson was asked by Yorkshire to use his good offices to help find a way to re-establish good relations between the two counties. He must have smiled wryly at the irony of a request to help deal with the results of unseemly barracking by his own county’s crowd, when he had been subjected to much more merciless and personal barracking in Australia just three years 98